terça-feira, 22 de setembro de 2015

Schlep Blindness

There are great startup
ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see
them is a phenomenon I callschlep blindness.
Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US.
It means a tedious, unpleasant task.

No one
likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start
startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it
on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to
talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people's
broken code. Maybe that's possible, but I haven't seen it.

One of
the many things we do at Y Combinator is teach hackers about the inevitability
of schleps. No, you can't start a startup by just writing code. I remember
going through this realization myself. There was a point in 1995 when I was
still trying to convince myself I could start a company by just writing code.
But I soon learned from experience that schleps are not merely inevitable, but
pretty much what business consists of. A company is defined by the schleps it
will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a
cold swimming pool: just jump in. Which is not to say you should seek out
unpleasant work per se, but that you should never shrink from it if it's on the
path to something great.

The most
dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious.
Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps.
That's schlep blindness.

The
phenomenon isn't limited to startups. Most people don't consciously decide not
to be in as good physical shape as Olympic athletes, for example. Their
unconscious mind decides for them, shrinking from the work involved.

The most
striking example I know of schlep blindness isStripe, or rather Stripe's idea. For over a decade, every hacker
who'd ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was.
Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yet when they
started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local
events. Why? Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for,
when you could fix one of the most important components of the world's
infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering
the idea of fixing payments.

Probably
no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking
"should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?" and chose the
recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight,
they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications
involved. You'd have to make deals with banks. How do you do that? Plus you're
moving money, so you're going to have to deal with fraud, and people trying to
break into your servers. Plus there are probably all sorts of regulations to
comply with. It's a lot more intimidating to start a startup like this than a
recipe site.

That
scariness makes ambitious ideas doubly valuable. In addition to their intrinsic
value, they're like undervalued stocks in the sense that there's less demand
for them among founders. If you pick an ambitious idea, you'll have less
competition, because everyone else will have been frightened off by the
challenges involved. (This is also true of starting a startup generally.)

How do
you overcome schlep blindness? Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep
blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say
that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles
they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that's one
reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.

In
practice the founders grow with the problems. But no one seems able to foresee
that, not even older, more experienced founders. So the reason younger founders
have an advantage is that they make two mistakes that cancel each other out.
They don't know how much they can grow, but they also don't know how much
they'll need to. Older founders only make the first mistake.

Ignorance
can't solve everything though. Some ideas so obviously entail alarming schleps
that anyone can see them. How do you see ideas like that? The trick I recommend
is to take yourself out of the picture. Instead of asking "what problem
should I solve?" ask "what problem do I wish someone else would solve
for me?" If someone who had to process payments before Stripe had tried
asking that, Stripe would have been one of the first things they wished for.

It's too
late now to be Stripe, but there's plenty still broken in the world, if you
know how to see it.

PORTAL DA
LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the
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